5 Simple Tricks to Reach the Inbox

I saw a post over on LinkedIn today. It was from an ESP, talking about their simple tips and tricks for getting into the inbox. The laughable bit was half the “tricks” had nothing to do with getting to the inbox, but rather were about enticing people to open the mail once it’s gotten to the inbox.
There are no “tricks” to getting to the inbox. There used to be some tricks. But the ISPs figured them out and protect against them.

Magician'sHatComplaint lowering tricks

For instance, you could create hundreds or thousand of free accounts and pad your mailing list with them. Voilà! Low complaint rates. Inbox Forever!
ISPs figured that out and it stopped working.
Then you’d create hundreds or thousands of free accounts, log into them and move mail from the spam folder to the inbox. Voilà! Users want our mail! Inbox Forever!
ISPs figured that out, and even sued a couple people for doing it.

 Bounce lowering tricks

One of the newer tricks to get to the inbox is the use of list cleaning or list hygiene services. These sell well, because they sound like they do something. ISPs are measuring bounces and non-existent addresses, so remove bouncing addresses and Voilà! Inbox Forever!
These services also claim to filter spamtraps. I actually got a real answer out of one of the companies about how many traps they had. The answer? Less than a hundred. Even worse, a client recently hired one of these companies to clean their list to get rid of a Spamhaus listing. The company identified ‘an inordinate number’ of Spamhaus spamtraps. Spamhaus tells me they saw zero difference in spamtrap hits before and after the cleaning.

What really works?

There is no trick to getting to the inbox. Theres’s no 5 steps or 5 tricks or 2 magic words you can use to get mail to the inbox. Like the magician’s tricks, they’re illusions. The folks selling you these tricks are hiding reality to make you see what you want to see. But the ISPs can see through the illusions and aren’t fooled.
Getting mail to the inbox means sending mail your recipients want and are delighted to receive. There’s no trick to this. There’s a lot of work to understand your audience, your product, your product lifecycle and your statistics. There’s work in creating copy and messages that resonate with your audience. There’s work in collecting permission from recipients. Email marketing is work and it’s skilled work.
Short circuit any of these steps and your mail may or may not make it to the inbox. Sometimes, tricks can get mail to the inbox for the short term. But those tricks let the ISPs identify you. Once they can identify you, they can block you.
 

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Thoughts on Data Hygiene

zombieemailOne of the big deliverability vs. marketing arguments has to do with data hygiene and dropping inactive users. Marketers hate that deliverability people tell them to let subscribers go after a long time of no activity from the subscriber.
Data hygiene is good. Email is not permanent and not forever, and the requirements for data hygiene in the email space are very different than the requirements in the postal mail space. There is no such thing as “dear occupant” in email. I mean, you can sent to occupant, but the occupant can then hit the this is spam button. Too many emails to “occupant” and mail goes to bulk instead of the inbox. These are real risks.
With that being said, there are a lot of things to consider when putting together a data hygiene program. You’re looking to remove people who are no longer interested in your brand as much as they are no longer interested in your mail. You’re trying to suss out who might have abandoned the email address you have for them. It’s complicated.
I’ve worked with a lot of clients over the years to implement data hygiene programs. Sometimes those programs were to deal with a bulk foldering issue. Other times clients have been trying to address a SBL listing. Still other clients were just looking for better control over their email and delivery. In all cases, my goal is to identify and classify their recipients into 3 groups: addresses we know are good, addresses we know are bad, and then addresses we don’t know about.
Good addresses get mailed. Bad addresses get dumped. The challenging bit is what do we do with the unknown addresses? That’s when we start looking at other data the client may have. Purchases? Website visits? What do we have to work with and what else do we know about the people behind the addresses. Once we’ve looked at the data we design a program to take the addresses we don’t know about and drop them into either the good or the bad bucket. How we do that really depends on the specifics of the company, their program and their data. But we’ve had good success overall.
There’s been a lot of discussion on hygiene this week, after Mailchimp published a blog post looking at the value of inactive subscribers. They found something that I don’t find very surprising, based on my observations across hundreds of clients over the years.

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August 2015: The month in review

It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post on pattern matching for a more abstract look at how people tend to think about filters and getting to the inbox). Successful email marketers are proactive about delivery strategy and are able to respond quickly as issues arise. Stay tuned for more from us on this topic.
I also wrote up some deliverability advice for the DNC, which I think is valuable for anyone looking at how to maintain engagement with a list over time.  It’s also worth thinking about in the context of how to re-engage a list that may have been stagnant for a while. A comment on that post inspired a followup discussion about how delivery decisions get made, and whether an individual person in the process could impact something like an election through these delivery decisions. What do you think?
As we frequently point out, “best practices” in delivery evolve over time, and all too often, companies set up mail programs and never go back to check that things continue to run properly. We talked about how to check your tech, as well as what to monitor during and after a send. Josh wrote about utilizing all of your data across multiple mail streams, which is critical for understanding how you’re engaging with your recipients, as well as the importance of continuous testing to see what content and presentation strategies work best for those recipients.
Speaking of recipients, we wrote a bit about online identity and the implications of unverified email addresses in regards to the Ashley Madison hack and cautioned about false data and what might result from the release of that data.
Steve’s in-depth technical series for August was a two-part look at TXT records — what they are and how to use them — and he explains that the ways people use these, properly and improperly, can have a real impact on your sends.
In spam news, the self-proclaimed Spam King Sanford Wallace is still spamming, despite numerous judgments against him and his most recent guilty plea this month. For anyone else still confused about spam, the FTC answered some questions on the topic. It’s a good intro or refresher to share with colleagues. We also wrote about the impact of botnets on the inbox (TL;DR version: not much. The bulk of the problem for end users continues to be people making poor marketing decisions.) In other fraud news, we wrote about a significant spearphishing case and how DMARC may or may not help companies protect themselves.

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Six best practices for every mailer

People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices.
I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail or a best image to text ratio.
My top 6 best practices every marketer should be doing (and too few are).

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